


Girls

by Aliana



Series: Do No Harm [10]
Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Gen, Gondor, Houses of Healing, Medical, Minas Tirith, POV Second Person, Third Age, following behind with the bucket, women, working stiffs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-04
Updated: 2020-07-04
Packaged: 2021-03-04 20:07:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25072114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aliana/pseuds/Aliana
Summary: "Sometimes you think about the thick, quilted jackets that the soldiers wear beneath their armor, next to their skin. Sometimes you think that this is what the women are, absorbing the shocks and the blows, soaking up the blood." A Minas Tirith healer contemplates care work and the people who do it.
Series: Do No Harm [10]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/16704
Comments: 9
Kudos: 10





	Girls

So here's Valacar, fretting over being given his first apprentice. "I'm not supposed to have one, yet," he complains. "I'm too young." Valacar is a surgeon, and methodical in his pursuit of unhappiness.

"He'll be young, too," you point out. You’re sitting together on his bed, drinking gin.

"What am I supposed to do with him?"

"Teach him and look after him, of course. Whatever your master did with you." You take a drink, feel the clean bitterness at the back of your throat. "Anyway, you'll just have the one. I've half a dozen girls, more or less, at any given time."

"That's different," Valacar says, with the airy authority that some men--and it's always men--seem able to pull out of nowhere. "Girls are easier."

And you laugh very hard, and punch his arm harder than necessary.

***

If someone were to ask what you’ve been doing for the past fifteen years (which no one has, yet, thank you very much), you'd give them an answer in three parts.

The first part, and the most straightforward: you clean and dress wounds, set bones, administer herbs. You stitch cuts, mop fevered brows, ask questions, dispense direction and advice. You carry chamomile. You take inventory of linens and bandages and beds, map out work shifts, report to the matrons and to the Warden, wash and dress the dead when they've no kin to do for them.

The second part is the girls: teaching them how to do all of the things in Part One, watching and correcting them as they go. You’re bemused at their private jokes and shifting allegiances, the ways and means by which they learn about themselves. On their own they are mostly well-behaved, these girls. In groups they can be mischievous and mildly covetous, whispering about things they have stolen: a nip of liquor from the bottle on their father's shelf, a ribbon from an older sister, a kiss from a boy they're sweet on. 

And you love all of them. Love them whether they stay on in the Houses of Healing, or depart after a few short years for the sake of a husband or a baby. Whether they're quietly gifted or desperately hopeless at the work they're assigned. You can't help but love them: here's Elloth, too pretty for her own good, with a prodigious memory for figures and sums. Here's Idril's daughter, Míri, shyly competent, the very picture of her mother when she smiles. And here's Tuilin, freckled, scatterbrained and wry, recollecting misplaced objects and appointments with a ruefulness beyond her years. Each of them awake in the world, in her own peculiar way. 

For most of the girls who pass through the Houses, you’re too young to be a mother, but you could be an older sister, an aunt. And so they come to you with their secrets and misgivings: about themselves, about boys, about the world. They sit on the floor at your feet, their narrow backs against your knees, as you plait their hair ("Could you, please, Fíriel? It looks so nice when you do it"). And you listen to them without chiding, drape an arm about their shoulders, advise them as best you can. 

It's not only you, of course; all of the women of the Houses take it in their turn to watch over the girls. Everyone has her particular favorites and chosen confidences. But if anyone wants to know about the girls as a unit, as a group, Girls with a capital "G", you are the one they will ask.

"It's good for them," Ioreth smiles, gently conspiratorial. "A girl needs to confide in a woman who isn't her mother now and again, doesn't she?" And, having scant memory of your own mother, you agree.

And, staring down at their hands, they come to you with their mistakes, some more serious than others: "I swear I hadn't meant to, but he was so handsome. And now…what do I do?" And you tell them, procure herbs, help where you can. Often it works out; sometimes it doesn't. Much harder than Part One.

You started in the Houses at sixteen or so, but as the years pass and things grow more dire, the girls begin younger and younger. And you’d woken up one morning, when you, yourself, were still really just a girl, and suddenly seen them as the children they were. And then you thought of yourself at that age, and the things you’d done, and the things that were done to you. It was the first and only time you'd ever taken yourself off shift before time was up. You walked out, broke down in the northeast gardens, in front of Idril.

"What's wrong?" Idril had asked, putting a hand on your shoulder. "What happened?" But you couldn't find the words, just let Idril hold you as you cried. Because you’d felt such wounded tenderness for all of them, and because you did not know then what it was to grieve for yourself.

Later you tried to explain it to her: "I'm so afraid for them, at times. The girls, I mean. For all of us, but for them most of all."

Idril nodded, looked thoughtful. "I haven't told many people this," she said. "Just my own mother, I think. But after I was married, I asked Yavanna for girls, only."

"Why?" You looked at her, surprised. Idril had never seemed the type to make such an appeal to the Valar, even in private. But then again, everyone had their secrets.

"I saw my neighbors and my kinsmen. Their boys went for soldiers, nearly every last one, and younger every year. Twelve, for the message-lads. And I thought…" And here she paused and smiled a little. "I thought, if I had girls, I could keep them with me just a little longer. So I asked; no harm in that, is there?"

"It worked," you said.

"So far, yes," Idril agreed, wryly. "I have the one."

"Will you ask the same of Yavanna, if you have another?"

"I don't know," Idril said. "Now, I think it may just be two sides of the same coin. If that makes sense."

"It does.” 

So, that's Part Two. The girls.

***

And then war spills onto the doorstep, as everyone always knew it would. Talk starts of a final emptying of the City, the women and children and the old men sent away. 

Except in the Houses. 

"The day we conscript maidens and wives is the day we have already lost, no matter what else happens," the Warden is heard to say. But he knows as well as any of you. You’ve all gamed out the duty-rosters: even with everyone set to double shifts, the Houses can't really spare very many of the women.

And in the end, more than half stay, a bright line drawn through your midst: most of the girls, and the older matrons, and the women in between, like you, who have no young children to mind. The possibility has loomed for at least the past few years, as the ground has shrunk beneath you and outpost after outpost has toppled to Mordor. You've all had a while to think on it.

The Warden gathers his remaining staff in the atrium, and the Steward himself comes down from the Citadel, addresses all of you briefly. 

Men and women of the Houses, I need not tell you that this is no easy post you hold, he says, his words ringing low and clear in the cavernous space. The darkest days are ahead, and you will bear up to meet them. You have my thanks, and that of your nation, for deeds both remarked and unsung.

And because his voice is grave, and because he is famously careful with his words, you also hear the thing that he does not need to say: You have my thanks for choosing to die here, and not elsewhere.

***

It happens fast, the waves of wounded crashing over the Houses, gutted and bloodied, heavy in stretchers and cots. You are called to triage duty again and again, because you are among the best at it, which is to say the swiftest and the most heartless, even as you soothe and cajole.

You can feel the battle through the soles of your feet. The walls shake, pieces of plaster and masonry coming loose from between the beams and joists of the ceilings. Someone will shout to brace, and the healers throw their bodies over those of the wounded men they are tending, hands laced over the backs of their own heads and the napes of their necks. And then the shaking stops, and they straighten up and go back to work until someone shouts again. In a lunatic moment of exhaustion, you wonder if this is what it is to give birth: the pause and the deep breath, then the tightening to the moment of pain and purpose, all the while cradling a life somewhere at the center of your body, another heart beating beneath yours. Over and over again, for hours, until some final release, some final cry.

They rise to the occasion, all of the girls. Even Tuilin, about whom you still harbor some doubts, even now. They are overwhelmed and terrified, but they bite back their fear, stare unflinching at the ruined bodies and masses of gore as they work, red to the elbows. They take up the work of evacuated kitchen maids and laundresses, handling trays and scrubbing linens, because the Valar know the men aren't going to touch those things. The pain draughts run out, and then the black tags they use to mark those who cannot be saved, and still they keep going. They take their turns feeding the funeral fires on the lower circles, covering their noses and mouths against the stench and the smoke. You take their chins in your hand, wipe other people's blood from their stunned faces, and wish that you had time to be proud of them.

Things would be simple, after a fashion, were the peril confined to shaking walls, even to the unthinkable cries of the beasts that wheel high in the air above the city. But danger is everywhere, shut in with you on the Sixth Circle, in the hollow stares of some of the veterans, in stray remarks, in purposefully careless hands. One night after the Siege, Míri is raped, and later you will marvel, guiltily, that she was the only one--the only one to your knowledge, that is, because who knows what else could have happened in those fraught, crowded days, pressed as you are into the dead center of a makeshift military camp?

Míri misses one shift, then goes back to work, shaky and bruised. You can only watch as she disintegrates before your eyes: she may not be trying to kill herself, yet, but she's also doing precious little to keep herself alive. You do her exhausted best for her, but Míri won't be helped, refusing the same comfort that she herself is tasked with meting out day after day. (To say nothing of justice, which you know she won't be given--not these days--even should she seek it.) The girl needs her mother, but Idril's hundreds of miles away, minding her son and her nephew.

***

Which brings you to the third part of your work, and the hardest. And that is the work of succor, of warmth and assurance. Often it's the work of smoothing your face into a smile that you don't feel, softening your voice when you'd rather bunch up your smock and scream into it. In darker moments, you think that your old life on the lower circles, of making men believe that you (or rather your time, or your body, you have to remind yourself) were something worth paying money for, and think of how it was good preparation. You came in with all the prerequisites.

But then, you'll think, it's also the work of bringing calm to the terrified and the dying, of learning their names and speaking them out loud in a world that is hellbent on forgetting them. This is the work of a lifetime, and even the youngest of the girls seems to know instinctively that this is her real labor, expected of her for all her days on the wards. And you, yourself, has been a beneficiary of this, at times.

It's not that the men can't do this work; they can, and they do. Valacar is very good at it, after a fashion, which is probably why he was given an apprentice after scarcely ten years of practice. You’re reminded of this every time you see him bent over a wounded man, bearing down with just enough of his weight on his left forearm, blade in his right hand: "No," he'll say, low and even, as his patient's gaze lights on the nearby tray of scalpels and saws. "No, look at me. Good. Take a deep breath. Again. Slower. Good." And panicked breathing slows, and sweating hands unclench, just long enough for him to do what he needs to do.

The difference is that, for Valacar, all these things are a means to an end. As soon as the cuts are sutured and the bleeding slowed, he'll hand the patient off to someone else. Someone like you, for whom comfort is an end unto itself. 

When a man sees a woman or a girl, it is said, he sees hearth and refuge. To which you would also argue that some men see all manner of things when they look at a woman--see whatever they please, in fact. 

But again, nobody's ever asked you.

Sometimes you think about the thick, quilted jackets that the soldiers wear beneath their armor, next to their skin. Sometimes you think that this is what the women are, absorbing the shocks and the blows, soaking up the blood. The girls perch at bedsides, holding the hands of dying men--some of them twice their age, or older--who call them by the names of absent wives and daughters. You will always remember the first time you'd been called Mother. It had been a boy of maybe seventeen, light draining rapidly from his pale eyes. You'd clasped his hand in both of yours, kissed his brow (though this, strictly speaking, was something you were not supposed to do), and stayed with him until the end, so that he could have his mother with him. You remembered, then, what Idril had said about asking Yavanna for daughters.

And all of it weighs on you, even as you keep your voice level and your spine straight for the girls, for everyone. It aches everywhere. You go to Valacar in his rooms one night after the host has departed for the Black Gate, when a taut, unnatural silence has fallen over the city.

"I'm tired," you say. You're sitting together on his bed, drinking brandy. It takes you a second to realize that you’re crying, because there are none of the warnings: no closing up of your throat, no constriction in your chest. Just the tears on your face, as automatic as sweat on your brow or blood from a cut.

Valacar carefully places his glass on the bedside table, sits back, and holds out an arm. This is unlike him, since he's never keen to be touched, at least as you’ve known him. But you lean into him, your head on his chest, and he folds his arms around you. You let him take your weight. It's almost shameful, how good it feels, as if you were doing something illicit. 

"I'm glad you're here," he says, after a moment. "Selfish of me. But I'm glad."

You pull back a bit so that you can look him in the eye. "You didn't ever think I'd leave, did you?" 

"No," he concedes, after a moment. "You were never going anywhere, were you? For those girls, if nothing else." When you say nothing, just lay your head back on his chest, he goes on: "You've done well by them. Better than I could have, that's for certain."

You scoff. "I should hope so, yes."

Valacar takes his hand from where he’s rested it on your back to tug at a stray lock of your hair. "Well, I had just the one boy, in the end, and I've done a fine job of it." The apprentice that he complained to you about, some three years back, has got it into his head to throw in with the host, on that suicide mission they're on.

"But you did,” you say. "You did your job. He's a surgeon, or very nearly one." This time it's his turn to stay silent. He takes the stray lock of hair, tucks it behind your ear, rests his hand on your back of your head. "Well," you continue after a while. "We can't keep them all safe, much as we'd like."

And you think about your girls. If girls are no easier than boys, in the end, it is only because there's nothing easy about people, and nothing easy about life.

"Have I told you," Valacar remarks, after a pause, "I am fairly certain that Elloth was attempting to flirt with the Steward's second son, the other day."

"Good for her," you laugh, not particularly surprised. Out of all of them, Elloth would have the best chance of snagging a nobleman, and why not try? "How did he take it?"

"I don't think he noticed. Fortunately."

And then you’re both quiet for a while, the only sound your breathing. 

***

And somehow, you don't die.

Somehow, a lot of things happen:

Here's Míri in the gardens, her head on her mother's shoulder, after the refugees have come back. She'll be all right, somehow.

And here's Tuilin, sometime later, deep in conference with a couple of the new recruits to the Houses--these ones as young as ever, for what can be done? Tuilin flashes a grin at you as you pass, then goes back to her tutelage: she's got the herbs laid out on the table, explaining their use and provenance to these new girls, and though some of her hair has escaped its cap and is falling in front of her eyes, everything else seems somehow to be in its right place. For now.

And somehow, finally, you meet someone who asks you what you’ve been doing for the past fifteen years or so. And so you tell him all of this--what parts are yours to tell, anyway. About the healing, and the girls, and the comfort, of holding on to all of these things at what seemed like the ending of the world.

So here's Saelas, looking thoughtful as he lies next to you in your bed, in a world that is so changed and fragile and full of hope. Saelas is a ranger of Ithilien, and he knows what it is to hold on for dear life.

"That's a lot," he says. "That's a full life."

"Very.” And you smile at him, mostly because you want to see him smiling back.

Which he does, and says, "So, what's Part Four?"

You shrug. "There is no Part Four."

"You're sure about that?"

"Fairly sure."

And you keep talking together, through the night and into the small hours of the morning. He tells you about Ithilien, and the forests and glades, the waterfalls and winding rills--all things you’ve never seen. And you think you can see in his words, here and there, small hollows and glimpses of space. The sum of which could coalesce to--what? Something freer, maybe, and more shadowy and curved than your life in the city, with its rows of sickbeds and its jewel-like squares of greenery, the rhythms of the day laid out in the duty-rosters.

"And what about the girls?" you say to Saelas, some time after he asks if you'll marry him--and leave with him. You’re partly joking, but partly not.

"What about them?" The way he says it, it's not glib--it's a real question.

And here, you realize, is the thing about the girls. One of many things, really. That they will take what you teach them and make it their own. That they can wake up and go to work singing amidst the rubble, dividing the burdens amongst themselves. That they are young women, now, whom you helped in the raising and protecting of. And that if they cry a little when they're saying goodbye to you--you, whom they assumed, just as you did, would always be here--they're also smiling.

Be you well, they tell you, one by one. Be you well.

_May/June 2020_


End file.
